Jon
Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus
minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal
and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's
third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines,
and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity
Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays,
and Fridays.

More
on hypocrisy

Though a general condemnation
of hypocrisy intended to bring to our attention the insidious nature of this common
human character flaw is valuable, citing specific cases is dangerous, even when
the examples seem clear cut. Maybe, lest we fall into the sin of judgmentalism,
we should stick to the biblical examples mentioned by the writers of Scripture
and the Lord. Or at least we should stick to historical examples. Or...maybe we
can try citing "mega-cases" of contemporary hypocrisy?

One
of that kind that came to my attention on Thursday was the claim by famed Harvard
attorney/professor Alan Dershowitz on a talk show that there can hardly be anything
more hypocritical than the "outrage" over the prisoner abuse in Abu
Ghraib Prison by Islamic politicians and journalists who
remained silent for a generation as Saddam Hussein tortured and murdered tens
of thousands of their fellow Muslim compatriots, and similar cries in other Islamic
nations which routinely use what the West would label torture as part of their
Islamic system of punishment and retribution for a host of criminal offenses.

Maybe
some would also want to cite the hypocrisy of France's attempts to block US/Allied
enforcement of the UN resolutions against Saddam last year, supported by Francophile
American liberals, when it has turned out France was ensconced in a web of contracts
and commerce with Saddam in a clear case of corrupt exchange of both western wealth
and political favoritism for Iraqi oil. Likewise the UN itself was double-dealing
with Saddam and Iraq, exchanging food money intended to help Iraqi underfed children
for oil and kickbacks from Hussein.

Maybe
only the most calloused conservatives would say it's a bit hypocritical for American
politicians to bemoan the abuses in Abu Graib or the loss of innocent civilian
lives in the war, while not only looking the other way, but voting to support,
the torturous killing of full-term American babies by way of partial-birth abortions.
It might be judgmental, or it may be something each and all of us are called before
the great High Judge to condemn. It might even be that, as in the European Holocaust
of the 1930's and '40s, our silence in the face of such injustice, inhumanity,
and hypocrisy will return to judge us instead.

Webmaster
Jon Kennedy

Going down?

It is hard to understand how a cemetery raised its burial cost and blamed it on
the cost of living.

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